ABSTRACT
The fact that this book is mainly about lecturing should not blind us to the fact that lectures are only one dimension of students’ learning experiences, and indeed only one part of our own teaching experience. In some ways, lecturing is a common factor across a wide range of disciplines (although not all subjects make wide use of lectures as a teaching method). The other ingredients that make up the mix of our students’ learning—and our own teaching—are far more diverse across disciplines. It could be regarded as a problem that lecturing gets such a high profile, both for us and for our students. Indeed, students can fall into the trap of regarding the agenda we cover in our lectures as ‘sacred’, and all the rest of the things they do as less important. Bligh (2002) has suggested that:
How to link lectures to other methods is an issue much neglected by teachers and not well covered elsewhere in the literature. … lectures teach information. Tutorials, practicals, etc teach other skills based upon that information. The secret lies in designing tasks (eg problems for discussion) that will practise the skills (eg criticism, evaluation, analysis, application of principles, decision making and so on). A major problem of curriculum design (distinguish this from syllabus construction) is how to progressively build skill upon skill and relate it to successive lecture topics.
